Need help finding Outlook contacts in phone and messaging apps

[Bollycats]

I am converting from WP Lumia 950 to OnePlus 5T. I have added Outlook as my default mail app. It shows my contacts are synced, but I can't find them in the phone and messaging apps. Is there another step or am I not looking in the right place?

 

[Bollycats]

I found them in messaging. I clicked on the new message icon and got a people icon. When I tapped the people icon my list was there to choose someone. But I still can't find that option in my phone app.

 

[fuzzylumpkin]

If you're using the default dialer, hit the 3 dot menu icon in the top right corner, tap "contacts manager" then tap "contacts to display". You *should* have the option to select outlook as a contacts provider.

 

[Bollycats]

fuzzylumpkin, you are my new hero! Thank you so much. This phone and Android are kicking my butt! I'm sure I will have more questions.

 

[mojophone]

Although i have Outlook installed and set as Default mail app, it's not showing up as an option in the Contacts Manager, for some reason. I had exported/imported my contacts to the official Contacts app so at the moment I have all contacts locally. But I realize this means that if I add a new entry within Outlook, the new person won't be an option for phone/text. Any ideas?

 

[PGrey]

Although i have Outlook installed and set as Default mail app, it's not showing up as an option in the Contacts Manager, for some reason. I had exported/imported my contacts to the official Contacts app so at the moment I have all contacts locally. But I realize this means that if I add a new entry within Outlook, the new person won't be an option for phone/text. Any ideas?

I had this happen to me, when I was moving my daughter to Android (we were all on Windows, for years, as a ex-Win engineer).
As such, I'm sort of married to the Win AD model for most stuff, and Outlook, accordingly, it just works for me, I understand the security well, etc. I also expect the syncs to be a normal part of the functionality, as you're looking for.
Anyway, I fiddled, and fiddled, and I'm sure my head spun around a few times, it just wouldn't pick up on the fact I'd designated Outlook as my source.
Eventually, since it was a new phone anyway, I did a reset, re-installed Outlook (obviously), and all of sudden the "Outlook souce" for contacts was "just there".

If I were you, and not wanting to do a factory reset (to start anyway), I'd nuke all my current contacts (assuming they live in the Live cloud space anyway), un-install and re-install Outlook, and I bet the source for Outlook Contacts will just appear.

My experience (above) was on a ZTE Axon, the one where it was maddening, maybe 9-10 months back.
When I moved, about 1.5 years ago, to a 6P, I had zero issues getting this to work. Recently, I moved to a 5T, which was a huge pain, because I was running 8.0.1 on my 6P, and the 5T had 7.1, and Android is woefully "short" in this area, they don't support any sort of "partial downgrade" to "close versions.
As such, I had to re-install, after backing up some stuff, like text/call history with tools, and rebuild most of the 5T from scratch (oh well, it runs well, such is life), and the import all the stuff I wanted.
I had a bit of frustrating experience, again with contacts not recognizing Outlook as a source, but un-installed and re-installed, fiddled with something (trying to recall...), and zip, it "just worked".

Personally, from a s/w engineering perspective, I think there's a bug in the Contacts setup mechanism somewhere, when you're trying to use things other than G-Cloud, as a source. I'm not motivated enough to fire up a debugger though, and even if I did report it, I'm not sure how motivated Google would be, to fix it (since it mostly works, sorta).
I bet Samsung has added some more of their "cloud presence" to the Android variant too, they seem to think that you "must" want to move to theirs, vs. the standard Live/Google/whatever cloud mechanism that you're all established in, IME.
Samsung makes great hardware, but I'm not a big fan of their s/w mods, or their desire to try and force you into "their space" for a lot of things, the "Bixby button" is another example...

Good luck, hopefully this is hopeful, and not just a diatribe...

 

[mojophone]

PGrey - thank you for all that info and for re-energizing me to start working on this again. (I came to the 5T from Windows Phone/Mobile.) I stepped back through various settings to make sure I hadn't missed anything, then did one more quick search online and found someone that had submitted similar synching questions to Microsoft several years ago (both synching from Outlook.com to Android phone and from phone's Contact app to Outlook.com).

Based on a few items in that chain, I opened the Outlook app to see what would happen if I added a new contact within Outlook (vs. the phone's Contacts). When I clicked the +, Outlook asked if I wanted to turn "synch" on. After hitting "yes", Outlook now shows up as a contact option in the various Android functions.

The weird thing is that I can't really find a setting for this within the Outlook app, so if I ever wanted to turn it off I couldn't. Just odd that I'd have to fake adding a new contact to turn it on.

Either way, it's working now. Thanks again for taking the time to send the above suggestions!

 

[PGrey]

I see the "sync option", under Settings (gear icon)->Accounts->MeAtHotM.com.

Clicking on the account name shows the option to "sync contacts" as a slider.

I have to admit though, I didn't know this was there, until I just checked, I'm pretty sure I never set this, at this screen.
I was fiddling a LOT, and my guess is there is/was an option in Outlook at first-open, but that's just a guess...

Great to hear you're dialed though, cloud-contacts (and other AD data and such) is the only way to go anymore, pretty much anything else is insanity ;-]

 

[mojophone]

What was weird was that before I made the change w/in Outlook, Outlook.com wasn't showing in the Settings>Accounts listing. It only showed OneDrive. I even tried deleting OneDrive and the Outlook app and starting over. I don't understand how my email was working w/o showing in the Accounts list, but it was. Oh well, there's a lot I don't understand, so I'll just add it to the list.

 

[PGrey]

Yeah, that is strange.
Outlook, OneDrive, O365 in general, all use the "Live.com" space, for credentials, essentially a remote AD for all apps that use this.
In general, if one is working, credential-wise, the others will too.

It sounds like there's either a bug in the Outlook registration (plausible, but seems unlikely), or in the way Android handles non-Google credentials (more likely, IMO).

I suspect there was something that triggered the account enumeration, while you were "fiddling", not all that uncommon to have it "just work" like that. It'd be nice to have some sort of way to manually re-enumerate these, but there's not, to my knowledge, outside of a reset (but I'm no Android guru, by far).

If Google, MS (and maybe even Apple and Amazon) ever decide to "play nice" in this space, it'd make things a lot simpler. Right now, I think the interoperability in the cloud space is hampered by this, sort of forcing people to choose one or the other, for their sanity. Then there's people like you and I, trying to live in a mix of two (or more), and it works, when things "align", or you know some super-secret tweak, etc ;-]

It annoys the crud out of me that I can't really configure my Google Home stuff from my PC. You can do a couple of things, from the browser, sort of, but really you have to pull out a phone or tablet, to configure much. This is pretty much "by design" from Google, IMHO, even though they probably won't admit it, directly. They have a web-based solution for most things, but not the Home integration.
Yeah, I could probably figure out a VM solution, but that seems sort of excessive, just to be able to use my big screen/keyboard/mouse, to configure my home stuff, since I'm (mostly) based on Google home in this arena, but use my PC for most config stuff...